Buffalo News (New York), May 29, 2005, Sunday

Copyright 2005 The Buffalo News
Buffalo News (New York)

May 29, 2005 Sunday
FINAL EDITION

SECTION: VIEWPOINTS; Pg. F1

HEADLINE: SPECIAL EDUCATION: SAVED LIVES AND WASTED DOLLARS;
DESPITE SUCCESS STORIES, THOUSANDS OF SCHOOLCHILDREN STATEWIDE ARE NEEDLESSLY LABELED AS LEARNING DISABLED, DIVERTING MILLIONS FROM GENERAL EDUCATION

SERIES: SPECIAL EDUCATION: SAVED LIVES AND WASTED DOLLARS

BYLINE: By Kevin Walter - News Editorial Writer

BODY:
Matthew L. Schwartz looks for all the world like any other college student, albeit one who is crackling with barely contained energy.
Whole paragraphs spool out of him in unbroken torrents: cogent observations, ambitious goals, cocky self-assurance. A trained observer might recognize the outlines of attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder, and might even guess that special education played a role in his success. Just how important a role, though, wouldn't be clear until this 20-year-old spells it out in four unambiguous words: "It saved my life."
Special education can do that, and it's the No. 1 thing to understand about this federally mandated program. It is expensive and time consuming, but it has given better lives to millions of students with a range of disabilities, creating taxpayers out of people who might otherwise have relied on social services.
The No. 2 thing to understand is that the program is unwieldy, haphazardly managed and that, as a result, it needlessly siphons millions of dollars away from students in general education. This mainly happens when children who do not need special education are placed there anyway, consuming services they may not need, or could attain at less expense.
That kind of misuse usually occurs as a result of good intentions gone awry, but it is also not hard to find evidence of motives that are less than pure. Administrators want to avoid costly hearings over special education placmements and services. Teachers look for an easy way to dump a difficult student from their classes. And, sometimes, parents try to poach the academic advantages that special education can provide. More time on tests may produce better SAT scores and admission to a better college. It's human nature, and it happens.
To Schwartz, though, such issues represent the exception to the rule. A Long Island native who is charging toward a double major and double minor at UB, Schwartz credits special education with helping him overcome a battery of disabilities that, in addition to ADHD, includes Tourette syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The young man who once suffered from rage attacks and felt like a medical "guinea pig" now burns with self-confidence.
"I came in here knowing I was going to kick ass," he said.
What is special education? In a nutshell, the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act -- or IDEA -- guarantees a "free, appropriate public education," delivered in the "least restrictive environment" to qualifying students: those whose ability to learn is impaired by one or more of 13 disabilities.
Depending on severity of the disability and the student's "individualized education plan," special education may be delivered entirely in the general education classroom, entirely in a separate classroom or building or, frequently, in some mix. Services may include more time on tests, extra instruction, occupational therapy and psychological counseling.
Special ed students may attend class in a general education classroom with two teachers. One is the "regular" teacher responsible for the whole class. The other is a "consultant teacher" whose assignment may be just a few special ed students, but whose influence can benefit the entire class -- if the teachers know how to work together. (To understand how complicated a task that can be, think of it as a marriage -- with 25 children.)
Importantly, the federal law, enacted in 1974 and most recently reauthorized in December, makes special education a legal right, one that defines responsibilities, provides remedies and invests parents with tremendous clout. The resulting bureaucracy is massive and not infrequently chaotic. It frustrates educators, intimidates parents and provides a living to lawyers.
And it is expensive. It takes money to test students to determine if they need special education -- well over $100 per student in psychologist time alone, not counting the cost of expensive testing tools. It costs money to convene a district's Committee on Special Education, which decides if a student requires special education and, if so, what services he needs. Beyond the pay of professionals on the committee, a district may also have to hire substitute teachers to fill in on days of committee hearings.
It costs money -- a lot of money -- in preparation time for administrators and especially in legal fees for the "impartial hearings" that may occur when parents and schools disagree (the district may have to pay the parents' legal bills as well as its own). And, of course, it costs money to provide the educational services needed by children with disabilities.
In Lackawanna, location of several group homes associated with Baker Victory Services, special education instructional costs amounted to $9.3 million in 2002-03, or 39 percent of the district's total instructional cost. Buffalo spent $131 million, or 30 percent of its instructional costs. That doesn't count legal expenses and other non-classroom costs.
Even in wealthier districts, the dent made by special education is significant. In Amherst and Williamsville, districts spent 19 percent of their total instructional budget on special education, far less than the rates of Buffalo and Lackawanna, but still large enough to give administrators and taxpayers incentive to control the cost.
As in all of education, school districts perform at wildly different levels in special education, and the effects of failure can be pernicious. Students with learning disabilities are more likely to drop out of school and more likely to end up in prison.
Money, competence and a school's attitude toward educating every student all play large roles in the number of students classified and how well they are served.
Poverty is a parasite
Start with money or, more accurately, its absence. When it comes to special education, poverty is a parasite, simultaneously producing disabilities while diminishing the ability of schools to address them.
Children born into poverty may run a gamut of hardships: single parents; parents having to work two or more jobs; household drug abuse, possibly causing fetal abnormalities; domestic violence; incest; parental illiteracy; poor nutrition; lack of reading and other mental stimulation; lack of discipline; insufficient sleep and other deprivations.
That puts those students behind from the start, said Christine Sawran, principal in charge of special education in the Lackawanna City School District. "They come to your school in such poor shape, with so many deficits, you have to improve their skills before you can ever begin to teach them," she said.
Poor children are not certain to encounter any of these problems, of course, but they are more likely to suffer them than kids from wealthier homes. Any one of these deprivations can foment a disability or at least ensure that the child starts school behind his peers. And without early intervention, such disadvantages can morph into diagnosable disabilities. "You can definitely create a disabled student," said Rebecca Cort, deputy education commissioner in charge of New York's special education system.
That's one of the reasons areas of high poverty have greater concentrations of students in special education; why Buffalo, with 23 pecent of families in poverty, has nearly 20 percent of students in special education, while East Aurora, with a poverty rate of less than 3 percent, has only 6.8 percent in special ed. It's among the reasons that Lackawanna, with a poverty rate of 13 percent, has 16.1 percent of its students in special education, while Amherst, whose poverty rate is 5 percent, has only 8.3 percent classified. Money matters.
But that's only the start of how poverty undermines students in special education, because if the lack of money helps to create the need for services, it also impairs the ability to deliver them. Buffalo, one of the poorest cities in the nation, has less money to devote to the kind of academic interventions that can prevent the need for classification in special education or, for the students already classified, money that can buy more and better services.
Consider psychologists, who are responsible for testing students before they are classified in need of special education. Buffalo, with a median household income of $24,175, has 50 psychologists serving about 9,200 special education students. That's an average of 184 students per counselor.
Meanwhile, in East Aurora, where the median income is $51,470 -- more than double Buffalo's -- three psychologists serve 175 special ed students. That's an average of 58 students per psychologist. Put another way, students in wealthier East Aurora have three times the access to psychologists.
The trend extends to other services, as well. Special ed students in East Aurora have six times greater access to counselors, and while Buffalo's general education population has slightly greater access to extra help under a program called academic intervention services, the need is far greater, given the effects of poverty.
Indeed, teachers in poor areas, especially urban ones, already have their hands full. The entire student population lives with the increased risk of destructive social influences, and collectively arrives at the schoolhouse door less ready to learn than students in wealthier districts. "Our kids start from behind the moment they walk in the door," said Sawran, of the Lackawanna school district.
That not only increases the number of students needing help, but also complicates the task of differentiating between students who truly need special education and those who may require some other kind of assistance. And perhaps to belabor the obvious, with so many students unprepared for school, less time, money and energy are available for any one of them, including those placed in special ed.
Parents under strain
Poverty isn't the only reason some districts have greater concentrations of special education students. Comparatively wealthy districts can have widely varying proportions of special education students, suggesting that some schools are not screening well.
For example, school districts in East Aurora and Lewiston-Porter each have median incomes of around $51,500, yet East Aurora had only 6.8 percent of students in special education in 2002-03, while Lewiston had 11.8 percent, or about 75 percent more.
Grand Island and Orchard Park also have similar median incomes, of around $60,000, but Grand Island's special ed rate is 9.5 percent while Orchard Park's is 13.9 percent, nearly half again as many. The state average is 11.9 percent.
Variances aren't always so significant, and several factors can influence them. Nonetheless, they offer a window on a national phenomenon: Despite efforts to control referrals, districts are woefully inconsistent in how they classify students for special education. It's not hard to understand why.
The parents of students with disabilities are likely to be under severe emotional strain, and they have specific rights under federal law. Educators, meanwhile, who are in the business of helping children learn, may be poorly equipped to resist an aroused parent who is determined to secure special education services for his child, especially when refusal may trigger a punishing round of administrative hearings, and may be financially illogical, to boot.
For example, if denying a parent's wish prompts a series of administrative hearings that cost $50,000 or more, generating reams of paperwork and devouring staff time, while the educational services sought would cost the same or less, why bother?
In the end, though, "why bother?" is the wrong question asked at the wrong time. The better question is, "How did it come to this?"
Not the only answer
Of the many misconceptions about special education, the most damaging -- educationally, financially and emotionally -- may be that it, alone, is the tool for serving children who have trouble learning. It isn't. In fact, special education stands at the end of a progression of possible interventions, any one of which might be a more appropriate response to many learning difficulties.
Under special education, for example, students are issued a formal "individualized education plan" that might include being given more time on tests. But any teacher already has the authority to give any student more time on local tests, or if a student's problems suggest it, to present a test in different format. No hearings, no committee meetings and no additional expense are required for a teacher to respond to the educational need of a particular student. All that is needed are teachers and principals who are aware of the tools at their disposal and are ready to use them.
If more help is needed, administrators, based on their own observations, can provide additional reading instruction to students who are lagging. They don't need to refer a student to the district's special education committee, develop an individual education plan and identify the child as needing "special education," which in the eyes of many people, retains an unfortunate and unfair stigma.
Some of these interventions are codified in other aspects of federal law, including the Americans with Disabilities Act and the No Child Left Behind law. Yet special education is often the solution of first resort, even though it stands at the end of a continuum of possibilities.
In some cases, where disabilities are severe, for example, special education may be an obvious need. But one of the law's unintended consequences is that, in empowering parents to launch an expensive and time-consuming process, it encourages them to reach immediately for that lever even if some other kind of help is more appropriate. At the same time, the law pressures school officials to accede to parents' wishes, even if they believe special education is not the right response.
Given the power vested in parents, the main hope of schools to restrict special education referrals to those where it is truly appropriate is for districts to show parents that they have all students' education needs at heart. Parents who believe that well informed school officials are working diligently on their children's behalf will be more likely to accept lesser initial interventions than those who mistrust the school bureaucracy and choose to exercise the clout that Washington has conferred on them.
Reducing unwarranted referrals to special education is both possible and cost-effective. A new report commissioned by the Erie County Association of School Boards cites an intriguing pre-referral program adopted by the seven districts in the Schuyler-Chemung-Tioga BOCES in the Southern Tier.
Under the program, called "7Share," classroom teachers collaborate with an instructional support teacher to provide extra help to struggling students. The results were dramatic: Of the students who took part, 76 percent improved their academic performance and 37 percent improved in their behavior.
Even more to the point, 45 percent fewer students were referred to special education in the first year of the program and 42 percent fewer in the second year. The study was conducted by the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
7Share's success is clear, but it depended, in good part, on the willingness of parents to cooperate, said Laurie Comfort an instructional support teacher who spends one day a week organizing the program. Districts worked to secure that cooperation by presenting evidence of achievement, including videos of students already in the program. They built on previous success.
"If a parent comes to a principal now, saying, "I want my child tested,' the principal asks, "Can we try this first?'" said Comfort. If the student doesn't respond to that intervention, then he moves into the special education system.
Sometimes, Comfort said, students with difficulties respond after only a short time with an instructional support teacher -- as little as 15 minutes -- offering encouragement to parents and students. (This raises an intriguing question: How much of the problem is in a student's ability to learn and how much is in a teacher's ability to instruct? The improving academic performance of students with disabilities strongly suggests that teaching skills are a significant issue.)
But for a program such as this to work, districts must win the trust of parents who wield tremendous clout under the federal special education law. That trust doesn't exist everywhere. Building it, one observer says, begins in the principal's office.
"You can tell a school that's welcoming to parents," said Susan Barlow, director of parent training at The Parent Network of Western New York, a Buffalo-based organization whose mission is to help people with disabilities reach their potential by educating their parents and the professionals who serve them.
For example, she said, a recently retired principal in the Kenmore-Town of Tonawanda district dealt with a severe disciplinary problem at Holmes Elementary School by concentrating on educational management during staff meetings, taking a year to go through a book on the subject. The principal, Mark Kaiser, also reduced the number of work rules from 40 to two and then, most tellingly, visited every home in the district.
Discipline problems at Holmes Elementary School plummeted to an average of three a month from 147, Kaiser said, and test scores rose, enough to win an annual statewide award from the State Department of Education. Said Barlow: "To me, that's leadership."
That's not a story about special education specifically, but it is one about building trust. As a result of Kaiser's efforts, parents of students at Holmes Elementary saw flesh-and-blood proof that the school was interested in them and their children. Without that cornerstone of confidence, all education, especially special ed, rises on an unstable foundation.
Driving innovation
Trust is only the beginning of the special ed gauntlet, though, because once school officials have gained it -- or even if they haven't, for that matter -- they still face the task of educating students whose ability to learn is compromised by disability.
The good news is that schools are figuring out how to do this. Academic progress is uneven, but each year shows an increase in the percentage of students with disabilities earning Regents diplomas. In 2003-04, the figure was 65.9 percent, having risen about a percentage point a year over three years. What is more, those improvements are working to the benefit of all students.
The bad news is that too many of them are doing so on their own, with too few resources, including money, training and easy access to best-practice models.
Nevertheless, special ed is driving many innovations in education, from co-teaching to "universal design" in instruction, which applies digital technology to break through the barriers raised by disabilities. Because most special ed students spend much of their time in the regular classroom with general ed students, such improvements also bolster the ability of all students to learn.
"Consultant teachers" are a good example. Consultant teachers work in the regular classroom with a general ed teacher, providing specialized help to certain special ed students, as well as other students. In addition, when a teaching pair have a good relationship, they can be resources for each other.
Susan Cecula is a special education teacher who spends two hours a day in Lisa Herrington's fifth-grade class in the Niagara Wheatfield school district. Although her primary responsibility is for four special ed students in that class, she works with the entire class, including small groups that combine special ed students with others who are having trouble learning but are not in special education.
"It's a huge benefit for the regular ed kids," said Herrington, and not just academically. It's also increased the acceptance of children with disabilities by other students, because unlike the past, when students with disabilities were segregated, those children today are often a normal part of the classroom landscape. "A lot of regular ed kids don't know anything different," she said.
Colleges are offering student teachers tools for navigating the tricky currents of the classroom relationship between instructors. It really is like a marriage, said Alice Kozen, an assistant professor of education at Niagara University, who instructs future special ed teachers. The nuts and bolts of making it work are necessarily up to the teachers, themselves. But the task is complicated by the job's relative newness. Even the professionals are just beginning to truly examine what role the consultant teacher should play, Kozen said.
All in all, special education can be like walking through a hurricane, yet in the midst of the storm are thousands of teachers, principals, administrators, judges and, yes, lawyers who manage nonetheless to keep their eyes on the ball: the education of children who were once written off as unteachable but who, it turns out, are anything but.
Most of these students are of average or above-average intelligence, but need to learn in different ways. For example, a mathematical concept taught algebraically may be lost on some students. Teach it geometrically -- that is, in a more visual way -- and the light may suddenly go on.
Something like that happened to Randall Borst, the University at Buffalo's director of disability services. Borst, legally blind since birth, said his teachers would not allow him to say that he couldn't accomplish a particular task. "I had to say, "I haven't found a way to do that yet,'" he said.
This was long before special education was law, yet he was expected to learn. He did.
Even for students of less-than-average intelligence, the availability of special education can make the difference between a life that is dull and one that offers rewards. Students who are mildly to moderately retarded, at one time consigned to the dark corners of education, do better when they are included in the general education classroom.
They won't function at the levels of their nondisabled peers, but they are more likely to reach their maximum potential, including the real possibility of employment, and are more likely to find acceptance in the world than if they had been squirreled away, as though they had done something wrong, and never expected to achieve anything.
"People learn what they can do rather than focusing on what they can't do," said Lynne Sommerstein, director of the College Based Transition Program at Buffalo State College, a non-credit program for students with significant disabilities.
Burden for local taxpayers
In order to increase the number of special education success stories, educators are going to need more financial support than they've received up to now. Upgrading buildings and equipment to serve students with disabilities costs money. So do classrooms with two teachers.
Yet, the federal government, which in 1974 pledged to pay 40 percent of the additional costs of special education, is paying only 19 percent, less than half the amount it promised.
Even that amount varies by state, and according to a report that looked at 1998-99 figures, New York was among lowest-compensated states, with Washington paying only 6 percent of costs and Albany kicking in another 36 percent. That left local taxpayers to fund 58 percent of special education costs, a real burden in poor cities such as Buffalo, where the need is especially high and the ability to pay for it especially low.
It's a shortsighted policy, as the success of students like UB's Schwartz attests.
The costs and benefits of special education are considerable. Adequate funding, a more efficient use of the special education money districts already receive, better training and consistent classification policies by informed and trustworthy school officials will go a long way toward ensuring that other students struggling with disabilities are given the chance for a full life without unnecessarily diverting resources away from the rest of the student population. That's not the case now.
email: kwalter@buffnews.com

GRAPHIC: Illustration by Daniel Zakroczemski/Buffalo News File photo Schwartz: "It saved my life." Charles Lewis/Buffalo News Fifth-grade teacher Lisa Herrington works with a student at Colonial Village Elementary School in the Niagara- Wheatfield district. Herrington, like some general education teachers, often works alongside a special education teacher. Charles Lewis/Buffalo News Special education teacher Susan Cecula, left, and fifth-grade teacher Lisa Herrington, go over lesson information as student Stanley Moore looks on. Table: Special education by the numbers Costs for special education students can be more than twice that for general education students, so it's important to correctly classify those who truly need the program. [see microfilm]